DeadOfKnight wrote:What about something like this for playing Skyrim on a 4MP display with high-res textures and 4xAA?

TR's 660Ti review has numbers for a OC'd 670 which should perform similarly. See the Skyrim page and click on the GTX 660 Ti button for comparison. Long story short, it should do quite well. You'ld have to step up to a 680 or a 7970 to do any better.

As for that specific card... I'm not convinced you necessarily need the extra 2GB of GDDR, at that price you can buy a 680. If you just wanted a better cooler vs stock (and happened to like Asus cards), you can consider this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121637 for 50 bucks less. (edit: yes, I know, it's not the least expensive card but I'm assuming the "OP" (sort of) was picking that card for a reason)

DeadOfKnight wrote:What about something like this for playing Skyrim on a 4MP display with high-res textures and 4xAA?

TR's 660Ti review has numbers for a OC'd 670 which should perform similarly. See the Skyrim page and click on the GTX 660 Ti button for comparison. Long story short, it should do quite well. You'ld have to step up to a 680 or a 7970 to do any better.

As for that specific card... I'm not convinced you necessarily need the extra 2GB of GDDR, at that price you can buy a 680. If you just wanted a better cooler vs stock (and happened to like Asus cards), you can consider this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121637 for 50 bucks less. (edit: yes, I know, it's not the least expensive card but I'm assuming the "OP" (sort of) was picking that card for a reason)

Indeed. I'm going to be doing a color coordinated build later this year and I was just wondering which class of product I should be targeting. By then, the 700-series will be out. So 4GB unnecessary? I just thought it would be good if I decided to do SLI. I'm always hearing about the memory not doubling as a problem with SLI.

DeadOfKnight wrote: I just thought it would be good if I decided to do SLI. I'm always hearing about the memory not doubling as a problem with SLI.

That's a valid question. If it helps, though not a perfect comparison, I'll go home tonight and check how much VRAM Skyrim uses on my Eyefinity set up and let you know how much it uses. I believe GPU-Z should tell me how much I'm using... if you have any other tools for me to try, I'm open to suggestions.

DeadOfKnight wrote: I just thought it would be good if I decided to do SLI. I'm always hearing about the memory not doubling as a problem with SLI.

That's a valid question. If it helps, though not a perfect comparison, I'll go home tonight and check how much VRAM Skyrim uses on my Eyefinity set up and let you know how much it uses. I believe GPU-Z should tell me how much I'm using... if you have any other tools for me to try, I'm open to suggestions.

It would be interesting to see how much it uses by default if you crank up the detail on that many pixels.

However, I'm afraid this is very much a YMMV situation as pretty much everyone plays a different version of Skyrim.

So... as tempting as it was to install STEP, I'm feeling kind of hungry so I'll try again later. Looks like a good set of mods to install though.

Instead, I just took my current configuration, 6048x1200 and forced 8X MSAA then ran around Whiterun City, outside Whiterun, and Solitude. Hardly scientific, I know, but the numbers were pretty consistent at about 2800-2900MG of VRAM used according to GPU-Z. (And FWIW, 50-90 FPS depending on what I was looking at)

For the record, either Bethesda did something or AMD did something with their drivers, frame rates and feel is consistently higher/smoother than the last time I played.

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I ran around again with NO AA and 16xSSAA. Small 100MB difference, which is kind of weird even though I could tell AA was working/not working. Frame rates at 16xSSAA were surprisingly good too.

edit: so I may be wrong about not needing all that VRAM. However, I don't have a < 3GB card to test against to see if there's a noticeable loss in performance.

DeadOfKnight wrote:It sounds to me like the game might see how much VRAM you have and base its usage accordingly.

I decided to test this and it appears that this is not the case. Running at 1920x1200 full detail and no AA is ~1700 to 2000 MB of VRAM. Seems that it might simply have been maxing out at the Eyefinity resolutions but I didn't really notice any performance decrease until I turned on Super Sampling. In any case, I guess it can't hurt to have more VRAM at these resolutions

Well, I think more important is the question of where the potential bottleneck lies. You can have a GPU with more VRAM and not enough power at those resolutions or you can have a dual-GPU config and not enough VRAM to take advantage of it. For a decent price to performance ratio I think it only makes sense to opt for both or neither, at least for the GeForce cards that only go up to 2GB stock. 3GB may be more than enough for now, but you never know what's around the corner.

GTX 670 4GB overclocked seems possibly the ideal solution for SLI. GTX 680 4GB would also work but you're talking $200 for a very minor improvement that may not even be noticeable in even the most demanding of games and settings.

In fact, it would be nice to see if TR could do a newfangled frame time measurement on the extra VRAM SLI configuration to see how it compares to the GTX 690. Maybe the larger frame buffer would actually make a big difference. Another thing I've been wondering about is if overclocking one GPU and not the other would actually bring down the microstuttering. It is possible to have them at different clock speeds, isn't it? I dunno, just a thought. Anyone upstairs listening?

DeadOfKnight wrote:In fact, it would be nice to see if TR could do a newfangled frame time measurement on the extra VRAM SLI configuration to see how it compares to the GTX 690. Maybe the larger frame buffer would actually make a big difference. Another thing I've been wondering about is if overclocking one GPU and not the other would actually bring down the microstuttering. It is possible to have them at different clock speeds, isn't it? I dunno, just a thought. Anyone upstairs listening?

Seconded. As nice as it is to see value comparisons, sometimes it's just nice to see what things are like on the bleeding edge.

DeadOfKnight wrote:In fact, it would be nice to see if TR could do a newfangled frame time measurement on the extra VRAM SLI configuration to see how it compares to the GTX 690. Maybe the larger frame buffer would actually make a big difference. Another thing I've been wondering about is if overclocking one GPU and not the other would actually bring down the microstuttering. It is possible to have them at different clock speeds, isn't it? I dunno, just a thought. Anyone upstairs listening?

Seconded. As nice as it is to see value comparisons, sometimes it's just nice to see what things are like on the bleeding edge.